Head of Northwestern's wrongful convictions group to keep fighting

Executive director to retire next year but continue his work in the field

September 22, 2013|By Dan Hinkel, Chicago Tribune reporter

Portrait of Rob Warden, the co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, on campus in Chicago on Tuesday, September 17, 2013. (Terrence Antonio James )

Rob Warden works in an office decorated with photos of people he helped to free from prison.

But when asked to name a particularly gratifying exoneration, Warden chose one that hasn't happened. It would be "the sweetest of all" to see Johnnie Lee Savory, who spent nearly 30 years in prison for a 1977 Peoria double murder before he was paroled, proved innocent by a pending DNA test, Warden said.

Northwestern University Law School announced Monday that Warden, 72, will retire next year from the Center on Wrongful Convictions, which he co-founded. Warden, who will become executive director emeritus, said he plans to keep researching, writing and advocating, and, as students bustled past in a law school hallway, he acknowledged he doesn't expect to ever quit this work.

"I hope not," Savory said. "I need him to stay."

Others will be less sad to see Warden go. Sally Daly, spokeswoman for Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, wrote in an email, "It is our hope that the new leadership there will display a more respectful and fair-minded view of the work of the prosecutor, rather than the cynical 'Us versus Them' theory disseminated by Mr. Warden throughout the course of his tenure."

Warden's transition to executive director emeritus marks a milestone in a career that has united two local traditions: bare-knuckle journalism and wayward justice. It also represents a change for the center, a main engine of the national push to reduce wrongful convictions and free the innocent.

"What we've accomplished here speaks for itself," Warden said.

A native of southern Missouri, Warden said he took an early interest in reporting and worked for smaller newspapers before landing in 1965 at the Chicago Daily News, a storied paper known for publishing writers such as Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg.

There, Warden covered everything from court cases to foreign conflict. In his office hangs a framed edition featuring his report on his harrowing exit from Beirut, Lebanon, amid violence in 1975.

After the Daily News folded in 1978, Warden was asked to improve a legal organization's newsletter, he said. That became Chicago Lawyer, the monthly tabloid where Warden wrote investigative stories on the justice system and questioned inmates' cases. He gave early attention to the Ford Heights Four, convicted double murderers who would be cleared and freed in 1996.

He was an exacting and sometimes quick-tempered boss who once hurled a typewriter, said Mark Rust, who wrote for him in the early 1980s before becoming a lawyer. But Rust said Warden, working before forensic DNA brought relative certainty in some cases, would weigh evidence dispassionately.

Warden insisted the typewriter story is apocryphal — typewriters were expensive, he said — but did not dispute that he could be explosive.

He eventually concluded the justice system was too flawed to abide the death penalty, and in 1998 he helped organize a conference on wrongful convictions and the death penalty featuring 29 people freed from death row. The conference, Warden said, led toward the founding of the center in 1999.

The next year, Gov. George Ryan cited death row exonerees as he suspended the death penalty, a step toward its abolition in 2011. Warden deserves much credit for bringing about the end of executions in Illinois, said Lawrence Marshall, a former Northwestern law professor and the center's co-founder.

Marshall, now a law professor at Stanford University, said Warden's ability to tell compelling stories of innocence sets him apart.

"What Rob has always understood is that a good story is worth 1,000 statistical studies," Marshall said.

Warden can't give an unqualified number of people he and the center have helped clear, but he listed 25 represented by center attorneys who've been exonerated, many by DNA. He named many more he said were exonerated with the help of people who would join the center or inmates who received some aid from the center.

The center and Warden fight vociferously for clients and causes, and not without conflict.

"I might have seen a little more gray in the world than Rob did," said former Cook County State's Attorney Richard Devine. "We had a number of disagreements, but I respected Rob and his commitment to his cases and causes that he was supporting."

The justice system isn't faultless, but Warden hasn't always been right, either, said Matthew Piers, a former Chicago deputy corporation counsel who called a Chicago Lawyer story on the city law department "grossly unfair." Still, Piers sees Warden as a friend and called him "one of the finer people I know in the field of advocacy and activism in the furtherance of justice."